The Robots of Gotham

by Todd McAulty

Let me tell you a little of the recent history of America. Pay attention because, unlike those cheap social media sites where you get your news, I’m going to give you the straight shit.

  We’re going to start in the hallowed halls of the Argentine Senate, which ratified the Juaven Doctrine in April 2080. There’s bullshit doctrines and there’s bullshit doctrines, and then there’s the Juaven Doctrine. It stated that Argentina had the unquestionable right to pursue threats to its national security, wherever they existed around the globe. Now, the original pretext had sweet fuck-all to do with America, but it was pretty clear to anyone paying attention what was happening: the Argentine government was laying the legal groundwork for an incursion on US soil. Why? Because of the New England Crackers.

  If you know your American history, you know the New England Crackers were an anonymous group of American students who—allegedly—hacked into an Argentinean AI nursery. If you believe the claims of the Argentine Sovereign Intelligences, these unknown persons infiltrated, influenced, and eventually corrupted a few dozen gestational AIs in Argentina and Panama. All of the infant AIs had to be destroyed.

  Assuming it actually happened, this was a big deal. The death of that many infant AIs at one time was virtually unprecedented. And it didn’t help that American-Argentine relations at the time were already shit. Congress had ratified the Wallace Act in 2067, making it illegal for a machine intelligence to set foot inside the United States, and in 2075 Argentina became the first fascist machine government. By 2080, the countries had been geopolitical foes for half a decade. Argentina was one of the first nations to grant legal status to Thought Machines, and some of the oldest and most powerful adult machines on the planet are Argentine citizens. It was their children they claimed had been murdered. It was, to put it mildly, a diplomatic shit show.

  One thing you probably don’t remember, because it doesn’t get talked about much these days, is that America once had powerful allies. All that was before the Wallace Act, of course, which kept machine intelligences of any kind out of the country. As machines became citizens everywhere else, America’s anti-machine laws gradually became recognized for what they were: bigoted and shortsighted. America, once the envy of the world, became more and more isolated . . . and more and more vulnerable.

  Something else you may not remember—since it was drowned out by all the saber rattling—was American president Sophia Bermúdez’s response to the crisis. She was a smart, resourceful woman, and a woman of peace—at a moment in history when the country desperately needed a woman of war. She downplayed the threat; said that if there were criminals in the US somehow responsible, she would catch them. They would be tried according to US law—although no one knew what the hell that meant, since it wasn’t clear what laws they had broken. Nonetheless, Bermúdez did everything she promised and spared no effort to find out who was responsible.

  Of course, she failed. Probably because there never were any criminals in the New England Crackers—none responsible for the death of infant machines in Argentina, anyway. They were convenient scapegoats for a foreign tragedy. Bermúdez was chasing phantoms. And when she couldn’t produce them, Argentina formed the San Cristobal Coalition with Panama, Bolivia, and Venezuela . . . and invaded Manhattan.

  Now, for sure you watched the broadcasts of that. That was some riveting shit right there. The world’s first true robot army, kitted out against the mightiest nation on Earth, all broadcast in real time by an army that dwarfed both of ’em—fleets of camera drones from every press corps on the planet.

  It was a helluva show. But while the rest of us ate popcorn and stayed glued to our screens, the Manhattan invasion was mangling the US—militarily, economically, and, most importantly, politically.

  But that’s not what makes this my favorite war. What makes this my favorite war is a guy named Saladin Amari.

  Saladin Amari was the governor of Texas. He was a devout Muslim, and unlike Bermúdez, he heard the drums of war loud and clear. While Bermúdez preached a message of peace, Amari spoke to huge crowds all across the South, telling Americans to prepare for war. On August 1st, 2080, Amari stood before a packed hall in Tulsa and said these words:

  “The enemies of America are the enemies of Allah, and Allah will bring them rains of fire. Before a single foreign soldier dares step on the sacred soil of this country, let them understand this with crystal clarity: Our strength flows from Allah, our weapons are glass and steel, our cause is nothing less than justice, and our name is the United States of America!”

  His speech galvanized half the nation. It also helped bring in the money he needed to fund more serious preparations for war. Amari was building an army of mechanized robot killers, long before anyone knew what the enemy would look like. And they were almost ready when the first enemy robots walked up out of the Atlantic into Manhattan two months later. Amari fielded his first mechs, driven by his top pilots, with the US Sixth Army two days later, and they met the enemy just outside Trenton, New Jersey.

  But you know how that turned out.

  XVII

  Monday, March 15th, 2083

  Posted 9:01 pm by Barry Simcoe

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  I took Sergei’s advice. I’m keeping my distance, for the most part. At least until we can be a little more confident that the data drive we stole from Colonel Hayduk isn’t giving up our location. No sense risking both our necks. Besides, Sergei’s likely too wrapped up processing the data from the drive, and hanging out with Thibault’s team in their makeshift biolab, to be very social anyway.

  When I got up this morning, Croaker was at my bedside again, wagging her tail. She’s made a remarkable recovery in the past four days. The medicine Sergei gave me has worked wonders on her eye, and there’s no longer any sign of infection.

  Which implies that Jacaranda, who’d warned me that Croaker had an adenovirus infection when I first met her at the Field Museum, had been right on the money. At the time, I’d been more than a little freaked out by the fact that a creepy machine stalker knew I had a dog. But after my second meeting with Jacaranda in the Sturgeon Building, a little thing like intimate knowledge of canine medical history no longer seemed so remarkable. At this point, I’d be more surprised to discover there was something she didn’t know.

  Croaker had enough energy that I took her for her first walk in the cold morning air, and I’m not sure which of us was more nervous. I didn’t have a leash, but it turns out she didn’t need one. She stuck close to me the entire way. It wasn’t far; she got about half a block from the hotel on trembling legs before she collapsed, and I ended up having to carry her back. She squirmed happily in my arms and licked my face.

  “You didn’t even pee,” I said disapprovingly when we got back. “You’re going to pee all over the mat again, aren’t you?” As a precaution, I moved her mat—really one of the hotel’s biggest bath towels—into the bathroom, where the tile floor would make cleanup more manageable.

  A few of the young women on the hotel staff make a fuss over Croaker every time I walk past the front desk. Hotel policy forbids dogs, but they didn’t seem too concerned about that. I think I’ll impose on one or two of them; see if I can get them to walk her the next time I’m gone for more than a few hours. It would help her to get out more.

  After my shower, I headed down to breakfast. Then I dropped by the seventh floor to get a quick glimpse of the bioreactor, where Sergei had already begun the work of creating the antivirus. So far it did not look like much. Mostly it resembled a giant disassembled still. I didn’t see Sergei, but I did introduce myself to the woman directing the construction, Dr. Joy Lark, a young Korean woman. She seemed remarkably focused and competent, and I left feeling good about our progress.

  Truth be told, I also felt a little left out of things, but I suppose that’s
for the best. I do still have a job to do, after all. Chicago didn’t turn out to be the mecca of high-speed data I was hoping it would be when I’d moved here, but you can still get the bandwidth you need if you’re resourceful. When I checked my messages Sunday afternoon, there’d been an urgent letter from Halifax, and two queries from potential buyers. I’d spent much of last night trying to secure enough bandwidth to connect to our VPN so I could shoot back some replies and get an update on our latest development sprint.

  When all that was done, I indulged myself with some personal data buys. I checked the political news feeds first, hoping for some news out of Clarksville, Tennessee, where a permanent peace between both American factions and the San Cristobal Coalition was being delicately hashed out. But there were no reports of substance.

  There was a pair of recent updates from my favorite political observer, Paul the Pirate, from his sanctuary in free Jamaica, and I happily paid to get them. Saturday’s topic: the brazen murder of one Sovereign Intelligence by another. As usual, Paul’s post was dead on target . . . not just the facts of the day, but also clearly pointing out the long-term ramifications. Kuma’s brazen murder by Kingstar meant that the era of machine isolation—Thought Machines and Sovereign Intelligences living ponderous and lonely existences of pure thought on windswept mountaintops, like goddamn hermits in a cave—had come to a violent end. To survive in this new era of conflict, machines needed to band together, to become part of a community. They needed allies for collective security.

  I wondered especially what this might mean for the remaining outcasts of machine society, like the reclusive Luna, launching countless tons into space from his underground stronghold in Australia, or the mysterious Aruban Prefecture, who’d cleared an entire Caribbean island of human life. Would they heed this call for collective defense? Or would they continue their enigmatic projects in forced isolation until the day a ballistic missile rained down on them?

  Paul’s brief post was also sprinkled with the usual tantalizing tidbits that demonstrated how well informed he was. What exactly did he mean by “discord inside the Helsinki Trustees”? And where had he gotten his fascinating facts on Corpus?

  There were several older posts as well, including an interesting interview with Dance Maker, a German Thought Machine who’d made a fortune designing and selling advanced biomedical devices to treat diseases in children, who was using his money to build hospitals across sub-Saharan Africa. Paul the Pirate titled that article “Inside the Mind of a Defective Altruistic Nutcase.”

  I couldn’t concentrate for long, though. My last conversation with Sergei kept preying on my mind. It’s tough to focus on machine blogs when you know that a small team of medical professionals, including some of your friends, are fighting against the odds to stop a deadly virus. And when that virus is rampaging uncontrolled less than two hundred miles away.

  Or when you know the name of the machine that created it, and suspect that very shortly it just might be making a concerted effort to kill you.

  Funny things happen to you when you know you have powerful enemies. You start to suspect everything—I mean, everything. Every unusual message, every chance introduction, every odd coincidence. You look for patterns everywhere. It can drive you crazy.

  Last night, I even made the decision to give up this blog. It’s supposed to be secure, but who knows if it really is? I’ve already posted what amounts to a thoroughly damning confession, but why add fuel to the fire?

  But when I woke up this morning, I decided: the hell with it. Is all this paranoia making things even the least bit tougher for the machine intelligence possibly plotting my demise? Probably not. My best hope, beyond just escaping its notice—please God let that continue for as long as possible—is to surround myself with people. People tend to help each other. That’s what I’ve always believed, anyway. And if that’s the philosophy that gets me killed, so be it.

  It was that attitude that led me to Rupert today. And Rupert helped clear my mind, get me thinking about things other than machines trying to kill me—for a little while, anyway. So I’m going to chalk up today as a win.

  I met Rupert while he was lugging equipment out of the elevator on my floor. White hair, rumpled jacket—probably in his sixties. It seemed weird that a bellboy wasn’t helping him, because the stuff looked heavy. I held the door while he retrieved the last box out of the elevator and laid it on the carpet, huffing.

  “You need some help with that?” I asked.

  He gave me a suspicious look, so I quickly continued. “I’m in 3306. Barry Simcoe.” I held out my hand.

  “Ah—that’s right. I’ve seen you around.” He shook my hand warmly. “Rupert Innes.”

  I grabbed the closest box and set it on my shoulder. It was heavier than I expected. I recognized the logo on the side—it was high-end telecom gear—but not the model number. The biggest box must have been on wheels, because Rupert got behind it and was pushing it down the hall with relative ease.

  I followed him to 3327, right at the end of the hall. He unlocked the door and ushered me in.

  “Wow—this is gorgeous,” I said, but that was an understatement. Rupert had a corner suite that was easily three times the size of my room. Two banks of windows looked north across the Chicago skyline and east onto Lake Michigan, where angry red flashes lit up the vapor clouds billowing up from the dig.

  He grunted. “Don’t get to enjoy it much. I usually keep the blinds closed—too much glare on the monitors.”

  I took in the rest of the room for the first time. There wasn’t much furniture. In fact, the first thing that struck me was that the room looked like a miniature version of the Venezuelan command center. There were digital displays everywhere—perhaps two dozen, of all shapes and sizes, including three that were at least six feet wide. The closest was one of the big ones, and I realized with a start that it was identical to the air traffic monitor I’d glimpsed in the command center just a few days ago. It tracked six different aircraft, four inbound and two outbound, including three that looked military. The bright green silhouettes resembled Brazilian GAT fighters.

  I must have been gaping. Rupert moved in front of me casually and turned off the display. “That won’t interest you,” he said, his voice even.

  “How do you get air traffic control data?” I said, still staring at the screen. “I mean, I can’t even get stock market quotes in this damn town.”

  Rupert’s expression told me that was an inappropriate question, given the fresh status of our friendship. “Never mind, I don’t want to know,” I said. “I’ll get the rest of the stuff from the hall.”

  I helped him move the last of the equipment into his living room. When we were done, I looked around. He had discreetly darkened a few of the screens. The ones that remained showed live data streams from the world’s major equity markets.

  “You have a real-time Euro-bond feed?” I said, pointing at a colorful display that tracked trades in Munich.

  “You’re nosy,” Rupert said, but he was smiling.

  “I’m sorry, but—I tried to get one. For three weeks. I was told it was impossible as long as I was in Chicago. Those bastards at globalNet—I knew my client rep was an idiot.”

  “No, he’s not. Your rep is right, for the most part. The Venezuelans are actively jamming high-bandwidth commercial traffic. Mobile phone networks, national data networks, satellite, commercial radio and TV—they’re almost nonexistent in Chicago.”

  I was still staring at Munich, waiting to see if quotes on any of my own holdings would pop up. I hadn’t been able to check my portfolio in days. “You seem to be getting signal okay.”

  “That isn’t a globalNet feed. It’s private data.”

  That turned my head. “You have your own data feed? From Munich?”

  “For most of the major markets, actually.”

  I whistled. “That must be expensive.”

  “It didn’t used to be. But nowadays . . .” He shook his head. “It’s not ju
st the data, but the whole package. A reliable network connection, dealing with the taxing authorities on import data, getting decent encryption—it’s just not possible to get everything I need in most markets. It’s why I came to Chicago, actually.”

  “You get reliable high-speed data in Chicago?” I was poking at the screen, trying to figure out how to query a price. I was dying to get a quote on Standish Mutual. Last time I checked, they were deep in a hole. Why do I waste my money on those goddamn bounce funds?

  “For the right price, yes. Chicago has some of the finest high-speed data infrastructure in the world. All the war did was chase away most users. Most of the bandwidth is still intact, waiting for a buyer. The spectrum the Venezuelans aren’t jamming, anyway. No, Chicago has worked out nicely for me.”

  I was still trying to submit a query when the screen flashed suddenly, showing me an alert and then a new column of numbers. They looked like commodities prices in Hong Kong. I saw a lot of red—prices seemed to be dropping in metals and oil futures. “Are you a bond trader?”

  “I manage a social aggregate fund. Pacific Reach Capital. Our holdings include bonds and equities, but chiefly we deal with large-scale financial instruments.”

  The name Pac-Reach was familiar, but I couldn’t recall any of the specifics. I looked it up when I got back to my room, though. They’re one of the fifteen largest aggregate funds on the planet. Holdings as of February 2083: $20 billion. Founder and general partner: Rupert Innes.

  This was one rich dude, and many of the things he’d told me now make a lot more sense. But this morning, he was still a mystery.

  “You’re a mystery, Rupert,” I said, tearing my eyes away from the screen. “Most major corporations have fled this city. People are getting killed—some for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and some for reasons that make even less sense. And here you are, living right at the heart of it.”